Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86651-4 - Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic Andrew I. Port Excerpt More information Introduction: The Puzzle of Stability All good history writing begins at the end. However artfully it may be disguised, however unthinkingly it may be assumed, the end of the story is there at the beginning. Where the end is judged to lie in time, what its character is, how it is defined – in taking these decisions about any piece of work, historians necessarily make their judgement about the general significance of their particular theme or period. –Timothy Mason1 When exactly did the story of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) end? On November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell? On October 3, 1990, the day the two postwar German states were officially unified? Or could it be argued that its story still continues and will only come to an end when the scars of division finally heal and the many social, cultural, and economic disparities between the eastern and western halves of the new Federal Republic are finally overcome? Whatever the answer to this difficult question, and for reasons that will become readily apparent, the following study of the GDR chooses an entirely different endpoint: 1971, the year that Erich Honecker succeeded Walter Ulbricht as head of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED). Even if one dismisses the bold suggestion that Ulbricht was one of the “most successful German statesmen” of the twentieth century, the GDR was in many respects a success story the year he fell from power.2 The economy and 1 Timothy Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “National Com- munity,” ed. Jane Caplan, trans. John Broadwin (Providence, RI, 1993), 1. 2 Quotation from Sebastian Haffner, Zur Zeitgeschichte: 36 Essays (Munich, 1982), 122. For con- temporary assessments of the GDR’s development under Ulbricht, see, e.g., Joachim Nawrocki, Das geplante Wunder: Leben und Wirtschaften im anderen Deutschland (Hamburg, 1967). On the fall of Ulbricht, see Monika Kaiser, Machtwechsel von Ulbricht zu Honecker: Funktionsme- chanismen der SED Diktatur in Konfliktsituationen, 1962 bis 1972 (Berlin, 1997); Peter Przy- bylski, Tatort Politburo¨ (Berlin, 1991). On tensions in divided Germany and the challenges of reunification, see Mike Dennis and Eva Kolinsky, eds., United and Divided: Germany since 1990 (New York, 2004). 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86651-4 - Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic Andrew I. Port Excerpt More information 2 Introduction infrastructure had largely been rebuilt following wartime ravaging, and the living standard of those who had chosen to remain had improved considerably since the end of the Second World War. Though still behind its West German rival, the GDR had the strongest economy in the Soviet bloc and was on the verge of gaining widespread international recognition beyond the iron curtain.3 But most important, and for the purposes of this study, the GDR still existed in 1971. Since the opening of the archives more than a decade ago, many investiga- tions of the GDR have understandably focused on the dysfunctional nature and ultimate collapse of the postwar socialist state in light of the dramatic events of 1989.4 The following examination tries, instead, to account for regime stability by focusing on its early decades – and, in so doing, avoids the sort of teleolog- ical approach that has characterized so many studies of the Weimar Republic. The implicit point of departure for much recent work on the GDR was that it was similarly doomed to fail, that its history was a “decline by installments” – an “Untergang auf Raten.”5 Yet the East German regime lasted for more than forty years, i.e., considerably longer than the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich combined. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of the GDR was its remarkable stability: From the outside, it appeared to be one of the most stable states in Eastern Europe and its population among the most docile. After the well-known mass uprising of June 1953 and before the fall of 1989, there were no major challenges to the regime from below – even though, as this study will show, many of the same social, economic, and political grievances that had led to the earlier upheaval remained pervasive. What, then, despite overwhelming evidence of widespread discontent, held East Germany together and accounted for so many years of domestic stability? This is a puzzle, and it is the question that has driven the following investigation: an attempt to explain the longevity of the GDR and, by extension, the Soviet bloc as a whole. Coercion and consent, as Mary Fulbrook has pointed out, are two of the most common explanations used to account for the stability of a given political sys- tem. Both reflect traditional assumptions about successful forms of domination 3 Good overviews of the GDR during the Ulbricht era include Christoph Kleßmann, Die dop- pelte Staatsgrundung:¨ Deutsche Geschichte, 1945–1955 (Bonn, 1991); idem, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte, 1955–1970 (Bonn, 1997); Dietrich Staritz, Geschichte der DDR (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); Klaus Schroeder, Der SED–Staat: Geschichte und Strukturen der DDR (Munich, 1998); Hermann Weber, Geschichte der DDR (Erfstadt, 2004). 4 For an overview of the vast literature on the collapse, see Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Die DDR (Darm- stadt, 2002), 73–89; Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London, 2002), 126–48. 5 See Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, Untergang auf Raten: Unbekannte Kapitel der DDR– Geschichte (Munich, 1993). Wolle has similarly suggested elsewhere that the GDR went through forty “last years.” See his Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR, 1971– 1989 (Berlin, 1998), 244. Along similar lines, see Rolf Steininger, 17. Juni 1953: Der Anfang vom langen Ende der DDR (Munich, 2003). For a critical assessment of the teleological approach to the Weimar period, see Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York, 1992), xii. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86651-4 - Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic Andrew I. Port Excerpt More information The Puzzle of Stability 3 and authority: that they hinge on the ability of those in power to ensure obedi- ence, either by using – or threatening to use – force to discourage and penalize deviant behavior, or by convincing those who are ruled to believe in the legiti- macy and advantages of an existing political order.6 With respect to the GDR, one of the most popular arguments along these lines holds that the Berlin Wall, the state security apparatus – the infamous Stasi – and, above all, Soviet tanks and bayonets were the keys to quiescence and acquiescence. The collapse of East Germany was a foregone conclusion, the argument goes, once backing had been withdrawn from Moscow and the threat of repression had more or less vanished: “In the end it was tanks and nothing but tanks that held Stalin’s empire together thirty-six years after his death.”7 Such claims are sometimes complemented by another popular explanation that focuses on national charac- ter and revisits the myth of the “unpolitical” or “passive” German: an obedient subject conditioned by history and without civic courage. The GDR, according to this view, was “typically German,” a state where “the sins of the oppressors were ...complemented by the sins of the oppressed.”8 A more subtle approach to this question argues that the ruling SED man- aged to maintain stability because of the various and supposedly successful ways in which it sought to legitimize its rule and thus win over large segments of East German society. The regime’s antifascist rhetoric and the promise of a future socialist utopia devoid of inequality, insecurity, and social conflict supposedly resonated, for example, with the workers and farmers in whose name the party claimed to rule. And the specific policies adopted to that end – above all the vast array of social benefits that allegedly assured East Germans affordable housing, inexpensive goods, and a modicum of social and economic security – all helped to ensure stability by procuring some degree of loyalty toward the regime. So, too, did wide-ranging job security as well as the suppos- edly unprecedented opportunities for education, professional advancement, and social mobility made available to members of previously disadvantaged social groups.9 The various strands of this argument have at least one important element in common: the belief that large numbers of East Germans came to support or at least accept the regime. This was “the glue ...that held the state together,” according to one study that claims, moreover, that the “system functioned” for 6 Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (Oxford, 1995), 271–4. 7 Hannes Schwenger, “Immer wieder Panzer,” Der Tagesspiegel, June 26, 2000. For a now classic statement on the stabilizing role played by repression, see Mitter and Wolle, Untergang. 8 Fulbrook, Anatomy, 11. For claims about supposedly apolitical East Germans, see Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR: Zum Paradox von Stabilitat¨ und Re- volution in der DDR, 1945–1989 (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 15–22. On the extent to which East Germans supposedly followed the “special path” of their forebears, see, e.g., Jurgen¨ Kocka, “Ein deutscher Sonderweg: Uberlegungen¨ zur Sozialgeschichte der DDR,” APuZ B40 (1994): 34–45; Stefan Wolle, “Die DDR in der deutschen Geschichte,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 50 (1999): 396–411. 9 See the essays in Christoph Boyer and Peter Skyba, eds., Repression und Wohlstandsversprechen: Zur Stabilisierung von Parteiherrschaft in der DDR und der CSSR (Dresden, 1999).